Mathazzar Posted May 15, 2012 Share Posted May 15, 2012 Hi everyone, It's been some time since I've been around here, but I'm always keeping my ears peeled for excellent new remixes from the site. I recently had the pleasure of arranging some cues from the soundtrack to a little game called Sword & Sworcery by my friends at Superbrothers and Capybara Games. They held an 'AV Jam', calling for fan art, and this was my submission. Do yourselves a favour and check out some of the extraordinary entries that showed up: http://sworcery.tumblr.com/ The original soundtrack was written by the very talented Jim Guthrie, and my arrangement is intended to show the material off in a different light, perhaps revealing some aspects of it that weren't immediately obvious in their original form. I'd love to share the finished product with you, and I look forward to your thoughts and feedback: http://soundcloud.com/mathazzar/maybe-a-time-of-miracles Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Dj Mokram Posted May 16, 2012 Share Posted May 16, 2012 Nothing short of stellar. Fantastic orchestral work, excellent choice of instruments. You've really captured the essence of what made S&S unique and expanded on that. I thoroughly enjoyed that game, because it made me feel something as a player. Your take on Jim Guthrie's work had the exact same impact. Music that make you feel something. Only nitpick would be the slight oversaturation/overcompression during the busiest parts. But that alone didn't detract from the enjoyment your arrangement provided me. Thank you for sharing this awe inspiring piece with the world. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Nonamer Posted May 16, 2012 Share Posted May 16, 2012 Woah! I was not expecting something of such high caliber. Very nice on the arrangement end. Personally, I loved the arrangement, and every instrument works well with each other. Although my only concern is that I could see nitpicking is that the song is trying to do too much, and at certain points you change the pace and intensity of the piece too quickly. But that's it really. Submit this and forever live in glory. EDIT: How the hell did you make that in Logic? What software/plug-ins do you use? I've been looking for a decent orchestral pack for a while. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
jordanrooben Posted May 16, 2012 Share Posted May 16, 2012 Um... Wow! That's amazing. I really liked the shift into electronic, and how you brought it back to orchestral at the end. The only thing at all I could say to improve would be that the beginning is a bit muddy sounding (to me). Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Mathazzar Posted May 16, 2012 Author Share Posted May 16, 2012 Hi all, Thank you very much for your kind and useful feedback! @DJ: You're right about the slight compression issues, and unfortunately for me, SoundCloud's encoding does me no favours in masking it (the WAV is noticeably cleaner). If I do another pass, I'll leave a bit more headroom and see if I can lose those moments of compression burning. Beyond the technical, the fact that the music made you feel something is the best compliment I could hope to receive, so I really appreciate you listening and saying so! @Nonamer: There is certainly a lot going on in the cue, that's for sure. Thematically, I had enough material to have it be double the length, but I was considering that even at 6 minutes it's stretching the attention span of many potential listeners, so the fact that it covers that ground at a fairly brisk pace was intentional — the notion being that people will be continually 'surprised' by the directions it goes in, and delighted to stay and listen to the end. There may have been a smarter compromise between the two extremes though, I've no doubt. I really appreciate the feedback either way. As for how I did this in Logic, it was pretty straight-forward: lots and lots of sample libraries and a ton of RAM! We'd be here all day if I started listing everything, but the usual suspects make an appearance: EWQLSO, ProjectSAM, CineSamples, 8dio, VSL, etc. for orchestral stuff and Diva, Omnisphere, and Massive for the electronics. Happy to answer more specifically if you need. @Jordan: Glad you enjoyed! I'm not sure I follow with what part of the beginning is sounding muddy to you (because I'm quite happy with the sound of the opening), but it may be my ears playing tricks so feel free to point out what area is giving you issues! Thanks again for all your thoughts, everyone! Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Mathazzar Posted June 24, 2012 Author Share Posted June 24, 2012 After making a few adjustments, I'm setting this to Mod Review in the hopes of having it looked at and eventually included in the OCRemix catalogue — fingers crossed! For reference, as per the instructions, here's a link to the original music: http://jimguthrie.bandcamp.com/album/sword-sworcery-lp-the-ballad-of-the-space-babies The tracks being remixed are primarily the following (there are subtle references to others but they're not always noticeable): 1. Dark Flute 2. Lone Star 3. Doom Sock 8. Ballad of the Space Babies 10. Bones McCoy 19. Com64 (Bonus Track) 20. Mushrooms (Bonus Track) Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Rozovian Posted July 3, 2012 Share Posted July 3, 2012 Half a mod review: Spectacular track, my main concern would be the cohesiveness of the arrangement. ocr needs something beyond a medley of sources, and a quick listen to this suggests it's a medley with book-ends. I'd have to learn the soundtrack properly before being able to properly eval it. Haven't played the game through yet, either. Sound-wise, the only crit I have is that the synth bass is too loud and pushes the compressor (tho it's too loud regardless of the compressor, which only adds squashedness in the loud parts). Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Mathazzar Posted July 3, 2012 Author Share Posted July 3, 2012 Well it may be half a mod review, but you get a full thank you! I'm not certain exactly what you mean with your first comment, only because — while it is a medley — the material is extensively adapted (even beyond the obvious retro -> orchestra transition), but if that falls outside of OCR's scope of interest then I completely understand. As for the synth bass, I actually brought it down in the revised mix and it's sounding okay on my system, but I guess it may not have been enough. If you like, I prefer to offer you the WAV or my own MP3 encoding so that you can hear it without the SoundCloud compression artifacts, as it's an entirely different experience. Thank you very much for your kind review and for the tips — let me know if you need me to send you a better encoding of the track for evaluation. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Rozovian Posted July 4, 2012 Share Posted July 4, 2012 ocr's idea of a good medley, one that meets its standards, is one that doesn't rely on a "source 1 source 2 source 3 source 4" structure in order to have new material, to flow, to change, but instead has all the sources tied together into a single cohesive structure. My impression of your track, not being that familiar with the originals and admittedly leaving that aspect for later, was that there's a chance of this arrangement being too much of a medley for ocr. The second half of my mod review is gonna address the source usage and arrangement... once I get to it. No, audio compression, not... audio compression... It's not an encoding problem. Low-quality encodings do something akin to bitcrushers - just more subtle. It starts off just losing transparency in the background, then starts to sizzle and after that you begin to notice a loss of high frequencies. That's the mp3 compression, or pretty much any audio _file_ compression. Slower sample rate, lower sample accuracy. Some online players compress files to stream them faster. Dunno if SC does that, and even if that's the case, I usually overlook stuff that's obviously a result of the encoding. What I was talking about was the dynamic compression - the compressor that changes how the audio behaves rather than how it's sampled for the file. The compressor/limiter effect. If you don't focus on the synth bass during that part of the mix, you should hear how everything else gets squashed by the compressor. This is what we call overcompression, when the compressor doesn't just push down loud peaks, but rather pushes down everything. They're both called compression, which gets confusing sometimes. I think it's just the bass that's the problem there, dropping it by a couple of dB should solve the problem. Gonna have a closer look at the sources and the arrangement later, possibly today, just wanted to make sure you get what I meant in my previous post. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Mathazzar Posted July 4, 2012 Author Share Posted July 4, 2012 Thanks very much for clarifying! Now I'm clear on the whole medley thing; whatever theme interweaving I did was in the orchestration rather than the overall structure, so I suspect that's going to be a problem given the policy you explained since the track is structurally more or less linear. As for the compression, I knew which compression you were referring to, I guess my ears just didn't pick up on the squishing after I re-worked the mix. There's a lot of headroom left over in that area. Either way, it's not important because obviously I can drop the synth bass further in two seconds if that's a consensus issue for the judges. No rush with the rest of your appraisal; I really appreciate you taking the time! Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Rozovian Posted July 5, 2012 Share Posted July 5, 2012 My guess it's a no for arrangement reasons. The electronic bit doesn't quite flow with the rest, but the medley structure is a bigger problem. There's plenty of source in here, it's just that the book ends Lone Star usage alone doesn't feel like enough for a cohesive arrangement. That said, I still think you should sub it. The judges might have a different view of what counts as too much of a medley for ocr, and if it's passable, we really wouldn't want to let this one go us by. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Mathazzar Posted July 6, 2012 Author Share Posted July 6, 2012 Thanks very much for the feedback, Rozovian! There's no harm in giving it a try, even if it may be rejected — I'll go ahead. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
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